Henri Ellenberger
Henri Ellenberger (* 1905, † May 1993 in Quebec ) was a Canadian psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, psychology and medical historian.
Biography
As a French parents in the British colony of Rhodesia born, he came from a family of Protestant missionaries of Swiss origin and should have had the French nationality. But because his father forgot to report it to the French consulate, he got a British passport. Later, he took himself, his stateless wife and his three children a French citizen. When he was threatened with the withdrawal of citizenship in 1941 by the Vichyregierung, he emigrated to Switzerland.
He studied psychiatry in Strasbourg and then moved to Paris, where he married a young woman Baltic- Russian origin Orthodox faith.
At the psychiatric hospital Saint Anne he met those dynamic psychiatry, whose story he told thirty years later. He has worked in Topeka in the U.S. and later in Montreal as a psychiatrist. In Montreal he became professor of criminology.
Ellenberger graduated from 1949 to 1952 his training analysis with Oskar Pfister, who was then already 77 years old. He considered then a member of the Swiss Société suisse de psychanalyse (SSP ) to be.
In the 1950s he acquired his extensive knowledge of the history of psychiatry and psychoanalysis in Europe. Ellenberger wrote and spoke with ease in French, English and German and was interested in all forms of psychological healing. He undertook a study tour to the United States. The encounter with Karl Menninger and stay at his clinic in Topeka, Kansas decided on the direction of his future work.
Actually intended Ellenberger 1953, after he was appointed professor at the Menninger School of Psychiatry to stay permanently in the U.S., but since his wife had been born in Russia, she could not get a long- term visa at the time of the Cold War. They decided, therefore, in 1959 to live in Montreal, where he received the Department of Criminology at the Allen Memorial Institute at McGill University.
Quebec City was his last new home, where he died in May 1993. He coined a generation of historians of psychoanalysis. His major work he wrote after twenty years of research in English: The Discovery of the Unconscious. The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. It appeared in 1970 in the United States and secured him worldwide recognition.
Bibliography
- The discovery of the unconscious: the history and evolution of dynamic psychiatry from the beginnings up to Janet, Freud, Adler and Jung, Bern, Stuttgart, Vienna: Huber, 1973 Revision: Zurich: Diogenes, 2005, ISBN 3-257-06503-5.
- Robert Duguay: Précis pratique de psychiatrie. Ed.: Maloine; 1996, ISBN 2-224-01029- X.
- Essai sur le syndrome de la psychologique catatonie. Ed: . L' Harmattan, 2004, ISBN 2-7475-6031-7.
- Ed. by Elisabeth Roudinesco: Médecines de l' âme, Essais d' histoire de la folie et des guérisons psychiques. Ed: . Fayard, 1995, ISBN 2-213-59500-3.